Search tuning
Tags, search permissions, the AI context, and the knowledge base.
Three admin tabs shape how search behaves inside your community: Tags boost the right people in searches scoped to your community, Permissions decide which profiles members can find, and Context gives the AI background knowledge about your community.
Tags
The Tags tab defines named tags you can assign to members (from the People tab's Manage Tags) to boost their visibility in search. The boost applies to every search scoped to this community — in the app, or from a chat bot acting on this community — whenever tag definitions exist (the tab's help text still mentions short or ambiguous queries; that restriction no longer applies). Two paths never see it: a bot search across all your communities, which carries no community scope and so skips the community-ranking stage entirely, and the public API and MCP server, whose search path shares the retrieval step but never loads tag definitions. Results on those paths are unboosted.
Each tag has a Tag Name (for example PhD Student, Core Faculty, AIV 09-10), a Boost percentage, a Description that helps the AI understand queries like "team leaders" or "2020 graduates", and Search Aliases — auto-generated synonyms you can regenerate or edit. Bulk tools let you Merge tags, Delete Selected, and Generate Description for several tags at once. Remember to Save Tags; the tab warns you about unsaved changes.
Permissions
The Permissions tab ("Permissions Settings") controls how the AI agent surfaces member profiles to non-admin members:
- Profile Visibility — All members (internal, claimable, and claimed profiles are all searchable) or Non-internal only (internal profiles are hidden from non-admin searches).
- Tag Scope — Any member, or Same tags only (members can only find others who share at least one tag).
Community admins always bypass these filters and can search all profiles.
Context
The Context tab has two cards. Both shape searches made in the app and through the chat bots; neither reaches searches made through the public API or the MCP server, which retrieve and rerank without loading any of it. If you are tuning results an integration sees, this tab is not the lever.
- AI Context — a free-text description of your community, its focus areas, and anything that helps the AI answer search queries better. Save Context stores it.
- Knowledge Base — Upload Document accepts PDF, DOCX, TXT, and MD files up to 10 MB. Text is extracted, the document is chunked and indexed, and search can draw on it when answering. Each document shows its status (Pending, Processing, Ready, Failed, Needs Review) with chunk and word counts, and can be deleted along with all its indexed chunks.